Bret Wooten, a businessman in a small town in Texas, sent this letter to newspaper in the state. He asks whether we really care about our future if we neglect our most important investment: Our children. He previously posted his reaction to visiting his wife’s classroom.
Are you concerned about the future of this country?
Me too, but not in the way most people seem to be. We as a nation are willing to invest countless dollars in our military, transportation and communication infrastructure. Yet, we have faltered when it comes to investing in the most important of all of our infrastructures, our intellectual infrastructure.
If we are not producing the best and brightest other nations will. China alone produces 5 times the number of engineers the US does, year after year. The sheer weight of those numbers almost guarantees we will be out innovated, a prospect I shudder to think about. This is happening as our political leadership plays ineffective games, wasting countless dollars and time on issues that will not make us any stronger or better as a nation.
The public education system is the most effective program we have for pulling people out of poverty and is a cornerstone to the US rising to a world power in less than a century.
States, including Texas, base their education system on a test costing less than fifteen dollars. That is not only terrifying but ridiculous!
That is why I am asking our State and federally elected officials to take the same standardized test as our kids and make the results public. Or, put forth real measures that will allow for us to maintain our place in the world. I sent them an open letter stating just that supported by a movement I am calling Standarizedkids.com.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great initiative! I would say add to that a movement called ScriptedTeachers.com and ask state and federal officials to spend one day in their jobs reading a script that someone else wrote. Since they pass legislation all the time which was written for them by ALEC, they might see scripts as another type of Cliff Notes which makes their job easier. So, I would suggest that at a Town Hall Meeting in their district, they read a script written by someone they don’t know, which might or might not say what they believe to be true, since teachers have no say about what is written in the scripts that are given to them.
Your tag line breaks my hart!
I would love to see that.
So true with ALEC.
“If we are not producing the best and brightest other nations will. China alone produces 5 times the number of engineers the US does, year after year. The sheer weight of those numbers almost guarantees we will be out innovated, a prospect I shudder to think about.”
Oy, where to start? First, can we please, please stop talking about “producing” people? Second, you do know that the phrase “best and brightest” is ironic, right? It was the “best and brightest” who got us into the quagmire of Vietnam. Third, just because China “produces” [sic] more engineers does not automatically make them more “innovative”. It depends on the ways those engineers have been educated. China practically invented the drill-and-kill rote memorization standardized education – that does not produce “innovation”. And finally, can we stop for a moment and think about whether “innovation” itself is necessarily a good thing? The Chinese empire, for instance, endured for thousands of years without finding it necessary to “innovate”. Our own empire has spent the last 100+ years innovating itself right into the nightmare that was the 2016 election.
And finally, can we stop for a moment and think about whether “innovation” itself is necessarily a good thing?
I agree. Same for creativity.
He needs to listen to Yong Zhao about the obsession with comparing U.S. Education to China and other countries with high PISA scores. According to Zhao, these same students who score so high on math tests 1.) don’t enjoy the subject; 2.) have much lower confidence in their own abilities; and 3.) score much lower on creativity than U.S. students. (See Counting What Counts by Yong Zhao)
Instead of playing “catch up” by “producing” great test takers, what if public education created enriched learning environments in which every learners could develop their unique strengths and abilities. What if, by returning much of the responsibility for learning to the learners, schools could strengthen their inborn love of learning rather than destroying it? If learners graduated with the knowledge that they could (and have) solved real problems, would that be BAD for the economy? Of course it WOULD be bad for our “leaders” who don’t want a bunch of people asking difficult questions they don’t want to answer! So hey–let’s double down on one-size-fits-all standardization and meaningless tests!
I wrote this. So this is my take. First thank you for writing. I was not sure how to take this at first. I guess if you want me to break this down I will.
I hardly think anyone would call our Political leadership our best and brightest, other than our Political leadership.
The Chinese are producing top-notch engineers many of them are working in the United States alongside our US engineers And are very well respected. Underestimating the quality of Chinese schools is a mistake.
I agree that over the last hundred years our country has reached a point that is quite disappointing. I would recommend thinking of your perspective differently. What if after World War II we chose not to innovate, what world would we be living and now.
I do not claim to have the answer to anything. I am simply challenging those in power to put their own reputation on the line with programs that they have backed.
I’m not sure I understand this call for real “measures.” I would bet that most of us can identify those students who are likely to meet with some “measure of success,” a term we also need to define. Our school system has managed to meet the needs of our society quite “successfully” in the past. The recent calls for more STEM workers is really an attempt to drive down salaries by flooding the market, which we have done in the past. What industry wants is cheap labor, and with globalization they can tap into an international marketplace of workers accustomed to much lower salaries. We know that well resourced schools serving communities that support their most struggling members with health and social services lead to many more positive outcomes for individuals and society as a whole. We know that a competitive culture in our schools that honors only winners and losers will create a permanent underclass of losers, who couldn’t “make the grade.”
Fair point
Real measures to me mean using diagnostic procedures to find and address weaknesses.
That may be resources, teacher training, child’s disability or any of the myriad of issues that can come about when teaching a child.
This effort is purely to put those in power on their heels and say if you believe in so much then prove it!
Sigh. Here we go again. Whether China produces 5 or 3 times the number of engineers the US does is irrelevant. China has about 1.4 billion people and the US has about 320 million. If you do the math, China has just under 4.4 times the population of the United States.
BUT – the US has had a fully developed economy for quite some time while China has in the past two decades been heavily ramping up. So they should be producing engineers at a somewhat higher proportion of population than we are.
I respectfully disagree.
Valuing the education that is given to our children should be the number one thing we are all focused on and there is a very high need in all the sciences.
It was not so long ago that the United States was in the same position as China is today.
Although we may disagree on that point, wouldn’t you love to see those politicians taking those test at your state capital:) This effort is to start a conversation. I do not pretend to offer solutions beyond putting those in power in check.
Good grief, I skipped right over this: “The public education system is the most effective program we have for pulling people out of poverty….”
Really? Sigh. No, the most effective program for getting people out of poverty is to address poverty. It’s really hard to say that education is the key factor when we have so many people with degrees (up through and including Ph.D.s) who are either unemployed or stocking shelves at a big box store.
So what is the best way?
I don’t know about you but I’ve never seen a study that indicates getting a quality education is harmful to the earning potential of an individual. It is true there are some people that are underemployed for the level of degree they have but Overwhelmingly the employment numbers for individual that have a degree are much better than those that do not.
I am appalled that so many teachers feel obligated to buy orange juice and granola bars and other school supplies for children, whose parent(s) cannot afford them.
I am a Freemason. We support many charities (like the Shriners hospitals). One of my favorites is the Masonic Angel Fund. see
http://www.masonicangelfund.org/
and
http://www.beehivefood.org/ (NOT affiliated with the Latter-Day Saints).
If you know of a child, who needs a winter coat, or additional food, or school supplies, please contact these organizations.
Another fine charity:
The Scottish Rite (Southern Jurisdiction) sponsors a national network of speech/language/hearing disorder clinics. These are for all children who have any of these disabilities. This includes: Stuttering, dyslexia, etc.
Fees are charged on a sliding scale, and no child will be denied treatment, based on inability to pay.
If you know of a child who could benefit, please see
https://scottishrite.org/brothers-in-the-community/ritecare-srclp/
Charles
We have steered mainly families to Scottish Rite over the years they are an excellent organization.
Thank you for your efforts.
Well, his heart is in the right place. He should drop all the scaretalk about being left in the dust behind China et al. His main thrust seems to be that his state is underfunding public ed woefully, while falsely gauging its merits on a standardized test. Sounds like a good place to start.
“Well, his heart is in the right place.”
Absolutely. He’s a businessman and the husband of a teacher, not an educator himself, so I decided to cut him some slack on matters that many in the general public are unaware of, including a lot of educated people that I interact with on a daily basis. That includes competing with China and putting all eggs in the education basket to fix poverty, when teachers have no control over out-of-school factors and, in order to fix poverty, we need to address it directly.
For example, we need more job training programs, including the kinds of trade programs that were eliminated at high schools in my district, due to the “college for all” push. We also need many more jobs with livable wages. In a country that is as wealthy and advanced as ours, there should be no such thing as “the working poor.”
Oh my God thank you!!!
That is exactly what I’m trying to do. Turn the tables on those in power put them on the defensive for a change.
The China part I do believe is important however it wasn’t so long ago that the United States was a laughingstock of the world. But this country invested in itself and its people and I personally believe the world is better for it, in many ways.
Thank you, Bret Wooten….
Thank you Mark.
Be Well!
Here is an excellent article about how much different nations spend on education:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending
Charles, Many nations do not include spending on special education in their allocations.
Nor transportation, nor lots of other services that we include.
It is important to know whether the inputs are comparable before relying on numbers.
I just read the article. It would seem fair to assume that the methodology used by different nations to determine their spending would vary from nation to nation. For example, nations with less violence, do not have to spend money on metal detectors and security guards at their schools.
And what about nations that do not include spending for children with disabilities in their calculations.
Charles, you express contempt for teachers, for public schools, and even for America.
I think you have no idea how you sound.
Perhaps those countries have more effective methods of gun control.
So true Diane!
The devil is always in the details. If you’ve ever taken advanced statistics you learn very quickly that you can manipulate data to give you whatever answer you want and most people will not have the background to understand that your data is complete garbage because of your methodology. My professor actually gave me a data set that I knew was complete garbage for a test. I talked to him after looking at the set and he said. “You are probably the only one that’s going to get an +A on this test.”
There are a few apples to apples comparison these days. I believe it is also why many of the statistics that are produced do not show the methodology or the data set for ascertaining their conclusions.
Thank you
Diane!